values

When is a toy not a toy?

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9 frugal mood enhancers.Last week DF and I had the chance to watch his granddaughter for a couple of hours. The baby, whom I’ll call “Rose,” recently had  her first birthday.

Her dad brought along a couple of stuffed animals but no other playthings. That was fine, since I’d prepared for her visit by pulling together a few things.

Technically, none of them were “toys.” Here’s what awaited her:

  • A clear plastic jug that once held eight pounds of popcorn
  • A small dough scraper
  • Some metal measuring spoons
  • Two canning-jar rings
  • A large kitchen spatula

For the first 15 minutes or so Rose sat on the couch like a very small queen with a very large diaper butt. She stared all around her, checking out the scene and fingering the textures of the afghans beneath and behind her.

When I gave her the plastic jug with the kitchen items, the fun really began.

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Can money buy happiness?

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th-1That’s the subject of my most recent post over at Money Talks News. Here’s what I think: Money doesn’t buy happiness per se, but it certainly positions you for contentment. Just ask anyone who can’t pay his bills.

“Think money can’t buy happiness? Think again” doesn’t suggest that money is the answer to all problems. As noted in the piece, I’ve been well-fed and gainfully employed and still incredibly unhappy. (Hint: That was before my divorce.)

But it’s silly to think that empty cupboards, disconnected utilities and eviction notices don’t have an impact on happiness. Money can buy a certain degree of security.

That said, researchers point to data suggesting that:

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Time is something we can’t do over.

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thThe 2013 Financial Blogger Conference was the best yet, and also the most exhausting. We got up at 2 a.m. on Tuesday, Oct. 15 to fly to St. Louis and, coincidentally, walked back through our front door at about 2 a.m. on Thursday, Oct. 24.

In between: a long plane trip, most of a day spent “frugalizing” a family with MP Dunleavey (for her Woman’s Day column), the conference itself and then a few days hanging out with my daughter, who also attended.

The conference days were a blur of activity, four days of leaving the room at 7:30 or 8 a.m. and falling back into bed at 1:30 or 2 a.m. Yet it was delightful to attend sessions, reconnect with others who’ve attended for three years running, to win prizes, and to discuss some very interesting work-related propositions (nothing I can noise around just yet, though).

Right now DF is on furlough (grrr), so we had Thursday and today to recover from the trip. It’s been tough for me to get my head back into the game; instead, I want to spend my days talking about writing and having other people cook for me.

Scratch that: I want to spend my days working only when I feel like it. I expect I’m not alone.

As I noted in “Termination dust,” being kicked to the virtual curb by MSN Money has caused me to reconsider the kind of life I want to lead. That’s why an e-mail I received today really resonated.

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Living in the quieter spots of life.

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thAfter my recent personal economic downturn I went through my monthly expenses to create an essentials-only budget. The most obvious trim was one I’d been planning (and failing) to do for months: getting rid of the monthly cellular bill in favor of a burn phone.

Due to my job I couldn’t drop the cell without having a replacement in hand. But researching the best options was just one more chore on a to-do list as long as my leg.

The layoff got me off my dime, as it were, and within a few days I’d canceled the old cell service (which had long since gone month-to-month) and bought a pay-as-you-go.

Compared to my old metal flip phone, the new model feels like it’s made out of potato chips. Yet the flimsy little plastic thing could save me as much as $70 or more per month.

Just as important: The new phone is changing the way I live in the world.

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Writers: Stop undervaluing your work.

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thLast spring I turned down a writing job that would have paid $450. The piece would have been long but not particularly hard to do, as I’d covered the topic before. In fact, I did a pretty good outline in several back-and-forth e-mails with the editor.

(Note to self: Don’t do that again. Ask what the job pays before you do anything else – and especially before you spend half an hour of your day e-mailing back and forth.)

Some of you are probably thinking, “Is she nuts? She turned down an easy $450?”

But that’s not really what I turned down.

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14 ways to get off the kid-gift treadmill.

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14 ways to get off the kid-gift treadmill.Last week I went to a nearby Jo-Ann Fabric and Craft to buy a book of brain teasers from the dollar section (60 cents with coupon – an inexpensive stocking stuffer for a young relative). An older woman was visibly fretting as she picked things up and put them down.

“What do you buy for someone who already has everything?” she asked me.

Seems that her two granddaughters, ages 4 and 6, drop by fairly regularly.  Some time ago she started buying little gifts for each visit, and now she’s wishing she hadn’t. Although the first thing they want to know when they cross the threshold is what they’re getting, they often don’t even bother to take the items home.

I gently asked if it were stressful always to have to come up with a new and exciting gift. She nodded, then shrugged and said, “But they expect it.”

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When helping your parents hurts you.

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When helping your parents hurts you.Last month I was contacted by Kira Reginato, an elder-care management specialist and host of a weekly radio program in Santa Rosa, California. She’d come across an article I did for MSN Money called “Are you your parents’ ATM?”

Reginato invited me to be on her program, “Call Kira About Aging,” to talk about this very sensitive issue. If you’d like to hear the result, you can access the podcast here.

No time to listen? Let me give you a few of the highlights, starting with some frightening stats regarding folks currently in their 40s and 50s. According to the Pew Research Center:

  • 27% provide primary support for a grown child.
  • 21% have provided financial support to a parent aged 65 or older in the past year.
  • 38% say both their grown children and their parents rely on them for emotional support.

Anybody but me think that sounds not only emotionally but financially exhausting?

Specifically: If you’re helping out parents whose money isn’t stretching far enough and/or picking up the slack for your under- or unemployed kids, what happens to your own finances?

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Termination dust.

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Termination dust.Today dawned a typical September day: gray and foreboding. The sky was the color of a galvanized trashcan and the air tinged with a chill that whispered of summer’s end.

When the clouds lifted a bit I saw termination dust sprinkled on the Chugach Mountains. That’s the local parlance for the season’s first snow. The tail-end of the tourist trade clucks and points, taking numerous pictures of the shining whiteness while buttoning coats up to their chins.

Residents pretend they don’t care, but it can drive a little shiver into your day. Sure, the snow is still way up there. But we know it’ll make its way down to the flats fairly soon.

Even DF, who’s pretty cheerful about everything and a skier to boot, gets a little glum at the prospect. In fact, he sings about it (to the tune of Chopin’s Funeral March): 

Woke up this morning, looked out the door and cussed:

There on the mountains — behold! the whitish crust.

Termination dust. Summer is a bust.

Hate facing winter again, and yet I must.

That made me laugh. I needed to laugh: Termination dust showed up on the very day that I got terminated.

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Let your geek flag fly.

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thMy friend Linda B. is a major genre fangirl. There was a time when she could be spotted at MediaWest conferences, dressed as a middle-aged Corellian spice trader* and participating in blaster battles all over the conference hotels.

She and other fellow geeks would see plays and skits, admire others’ costumes, buy fan fiction (including some rather startling “slash” fiction) and, yeah, shoot at one another.

She and several other middle-aged women would share hotel rooms and at some point conduct readings of abysmally written fan fiction. A particular “Star Wars” story always brought the house down with the line, “Han spurted into the room.”

Good times, despite the expense of traveling from Alaska to Lansing and the “con crud” that she always seemed to catch.

These days she’s staying closer to home – working, writing plays, making jewelry and doing free-form bead weaving – but she’s still a geek. Or maybe she’s a nerd. Probably both.

Either way she’s a fangirl, which is how she came to send me the link to this Wil Wheaton video, “Why it’s awesome to be a nerd.” This is the kind of thing that slips over her transom on a regular basis, along with things like song parodies based on characters from “The X-Files” or news about the latest Doctor to play “Dr. Who.”

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The opposite of obligation.

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imagesEver seen the Pixar film “Up”? In the how-Carl-and-Ellie-met montage is a moment when the two of them sit side by side, reading and holding hands.

That was DF and me on Sunday, reading and hand-holding in adjoining easy chairs. For him it was “Mozart in the Jungle” and for me it was one of the “Anne of Green Gables” books. (I’d never read the series as a kid and recently I found several titles in the recycle bin.)

It was so nice to see DF rooted for a while. Usually he’s in constant motion: cooking, working in the yard or garden, hanging out laundry, tidying up. Even when he sits still he’s often working: paying bills, balancing his checkbook, dealing with his father’s estate. Yet there he was, reading a non-work-related book and smiling.

And me? The day before I’d written a post for Surviving and Thriving and finished my Monday post for MSN Money. Thus I felt temporarily free to follow the adventures of Anne Shirley, even though unread personal finance books are currently stacked eyebrow-high on the desk.

For the first time in who knows when, we were observing a Sabbath. I don’t mean that in a strictly religious sense, but as a day of rest. A chance to recharge. A dozen hours of peace. The opposite of obligation.

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